I saw him standing in the doorway. He held a driving cap–black and white, flecked with gray–turning it in his hands as if he could reshape it with skill and effort. One of the mortuary staff spoke quietly to him; he nodded and let the man take the cap, looking relieved to pass his problem to someone else. This was my first sight of him Since.
Now he stands beside my mother’s casket and bows his head. I feel everyone looking at me, wondering what I’ll do.
I wonder, myself.
What do I say to him? “Hello” seems inadequate, after twenty years. “Glad you could make it” sounds like code for “Where the hell have you been”, and “Where the hell have you been” is a question I don’t want to ask. I don’t care where he’s been, because I know where he hasn’t been: Here. Around. In touch. Reachable when he was needed.
I watch a tear drop from his right cheek onto the lapel of his gray tweed jacket, and another drop from his left cheek into the snowy folds of his gray-edged pocket handkerchief.
How tasteful, the gray: Acknowledging his abdication of the right to wear black, but quietly maintaining his right to mourn. How discreetly effective. I want to slap him.
The last time I saw him, six days after I turned twelve, there were tears in his eyes and the red print of a hand across his cheek. My mother’s hand. Shouts woke me; abrupt silence pulled me out of bed. I opened my door a crack; the glass in the picture across the hall reflected the living room with mirror clarity.
She stood, left arm across her body, right hand covering her mouth, her back to him. His hands hung at his sides.
“What can I say?” he asked, so quietly I wouldn’t have heard him with the door closed. “I don’t know what to say that wouldn’t hurt you more.”
She took a deep breath and choked out one word: “Impossible.”
The next day, she took me to Grandma’s for a week. When we came home, all his things were gone. We never talked about him. We pretended he had never been, so how could we talk about his absence? I sometimes wondered what I would say to him if he called, but I never got the chance to find out.
Until now.
Now he turns to me. His eyes flicker, taking me in, noting the wedding ring, the “#1 MOM” brooch with its bar holding three birthstones, the threads of silver in my hair.
I see the years in his eyes. I see, in his eyes, that every year I measured without my father was a year he measured without his child.
Lost moments track his face with salt, and I know what words to use.
I extend my hand.
I say nothing, after all.
# # # # #
This story won Second Place, 2002 NetAuthor/E2K Flash Fiction Contest.
What a beautiful story. You made me cry. Thanks for this, Marian.
I really had my sad on when I wrote that. HUGS